ISLAMABAD, Oct 12: Relief operations in the earthquake devastated areas got streamlined on Wednesday after days of frustration as communications improved with the reopening of roads and more helicopters joining the relief effort.

Pakistan Air Force established a forward base at Muzaffarabad airport where its C-130 cargo planes airdropped relief goods for onward delivery to remote villages by land where aid had not reached even five days after the quake struck.

Helicopters of the army aviation and the foreign relief teams meanwhile continued ferrying medical personnel and goods to field hospitals set up at Muzaffarabad and Balakot, which suffered most grievously from the quake, and evacuating the seriously injured to hospitals in Islamabad and Rawalpindi.

A correspondent of Dawn who visited Dhirkot, in the badly affected Bagh district of Azad Kashmir, found that despite the accelerated relief effort, people there were still waiting for help.

A civil official of Balakot said that the Pakistan army, which has moved one division each to Muzaffarabad and Mansehra, the two areas most affected by the killer quake, will be employing its mule unit to take relief to the inaccessible mountain villages.

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz again visited Muzaffarabad to review the relief efforts. “It is difficult work but the delivery of relief is improving day by day,” he told reporters at a field hospital over the shrieks of pain of the injured being treated there.

President Pervez Musharraf also promised in a broadcast to the nation that after the initial hiccups “relief operations would be conducted in the best way”.

Satellite images of the affected mountainous region are being obtained to locate the remote and isolated villages which need help, he said.